Intelligence, perhaps sentience of many more beings than we previously imagined?
See also: amazing beings, unseen beings
Research has shown that we don’t consider plants to be important mostly because they grow close together and don’t appear to move. As Wandersee and Schlusser wrote, “Static proximity is a visual cue humans use to group objects, so individual plants and different plant species tend to be de-emphasized.” A vine takes hours to turn toward sunlight, a bristlecone hundreds of years to mature. Each organism’s clock — its sense of time — is so different from ours that we can’t even sense it. 1
Readings
- Insects and Other Animals May Have Consciousness
- The Surprisingly Sophisticated Mind Of An Insect
- What a Plant Knows
- The Light Eaters
- An Immense World